Flippa.com Hacked?

Firstly, they had to contend with the endless ‘my sites aren’t selling’ drama when the entire starter site (no traffic no revenue) market collapsed.

I believe in marketplace responsibility but I also believe people gave Flippa a hard time unnecessarily and blamed everything from poor quality traffic through to the selling fees as a way of disguising the fact they were failing to sell because what they we’re selling was no longer in demand.

The fun was far from over when the forums and blogs lit up with disgruntled users, many of whom had been the victim of fraud and non paying bidders. Some people blamed it on a rise in poor quality traffic from India and Indonesia according to Alexa (nb. This is not my opinion!) but again, most just blamed Flippa’s management and policies.

Bad luck seems to come in threes as this week, ‘ethical hacker’ IH-Adam claimed to hack into Flippa’s admin panel, taking a video as evidence.

Flippa we’re apparently notified of the issue, but it seems it didn’t go down all too well

I don’t know the full situation, other than what I’ve read on Adam’s blog and personally, don’t have enough money to be sued, so I wont risk expressing an opinion….but I certainly hope Flippa manage to resolve their issues soon, so we (Flippa included) can all get back to what we came here to do in the first place…sell sites and make a profit!

18 Comments

You beat me on this story…lol. I took the past few days off and when I “went back to work” this evening there was a Google Alert about this story sitting in my inbox so I just posted about it. I thought I would check to see if any other bloggers in our niche had anything to say about this story and I see you beat me to the punch. Good scoop:)

Are you taking this story seriously or do you think it’s much to do about nothing? I’ve changed my passwords just to be safe.

If anyone would have a cached copy of the post – it would be you! I did at first wonder if it was a hoax, but seeing that ‘mystery disappearing post’ made it all real. I’ll update the article with a link, in the interest of ‘unbiased reporting’.

I do not understand what the big deal is – websites, and webservers get hacked – its just a fact of life on the internet.

When webhosting talk was hacked, and about 6 months of forum post were lost, there was barely a mention of it. It was like no big deal, websites get hacked all the time. But for some reason this flippa stuff is really making the rounds through the webmaster forums and blogs.

I agree in some part and websites do get hacked everyday, but this is highly relevant to THIS industry and part of a series of unfortunate events for Flippa. As this blog is relevant to buying and selling websites it seems relevant to blog about it.

Cool niche you’re in btw. It’s great to see someone who can actually get out and create content rather than just autoblogging or borrowing ideas! (and dont say it – my posts usually are original – this one’s just an exception )

Justin, are these the same admins who buy and sell sites themselves and could derive commercial benefit from listening in to conversations between buyers and sellers?

If they are, strange how they never mentioned this access in their terms or their privacy policy, isn’t it? Not only do they want to snoop on user PMs, they wanted to do it without users ever knowing they had this access.

One thing in their privacy policy is true: “That’s right – this little site is more complicated than it looks!”